A dynamic programming approach for solving single-source uncapacitated concave minimum cost network flow problems

Abstract

In this paper, we describe a dynamic programming approach to solve optimally the single-source uncapacitated minimum cost network flow problem with general concave costs. This class of problems is known to be NP- Hard and there is a scarcity of methods to solve them in their full generality. The algorithms previously developed critically depend on the type of cost functions considered and on the number of nonlinear arc costs. Here, a new dynamic programming approach that does not depend on any of these factors is proposed. Computational experiments were performed using randomly generated problems. The computational results reported for small and medium size problems indicate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.